Alberto Zuin Network Specialist

A few tips to improve your LinkedIn profile

As already said a few weeks ago, far from me to be an expert in social media marketing, but in the last few weeks I have been active in this thing and, experimenting a lot, I have made ​​some progress in my situation.

In particular, about my profession, I have found particularly useful LinkedIn: For those who do not know, LinkedIn is a professional social network, therefore, here there are professionals from many different industries, not just about the IT.

The purpose of LinkedIn is to create relationships between people who already had professional experience (and education) together; the process of creating the relationship is identical to Facebook, therefore who receives the request for contact has the right to accept or reject it. In addition, given that the policy of LinkedIn is to validate existing relationships and not create new ones without any previous, if you require the contact to a person who does not really know you, this has the right to report the abuse to LinkedIn, so it could suspend the possibility to ask new contacts.

LinkedIn has a very powerful search engine built in, so it is very effective in connecting job seekers with those in need of labor: for example, a CEO may seek a person with certain skills and the engine search will return profiles that match your search.

So, how do to be among the first places? Here are some tips to improve your LinkedIn profile.

Consistency

Like any other search engine, you need to be consistent in all parts of your profile. For example, if you work as PHP programmer, you must mention this skill in the “subtitle”, in the introduction, the work experiences and in the skills. At the same time, you must have a high number of endorsement from your contacts for that skill. Ideally, it would be desirable that you receives at least 100 skill endorsement.

Profile completion

The most complete profiles are better evaluated by the search engine. You need to have your profile 100% complete and continue to keep it updated so that it is always full. In fact, LinkedIn occasionally introduces new parameters that must be completed.

In addition, being a social network that is based on the relationships between people, it is important not to use your company logo as a profile picture, but an own pictures. To promote your company, LinkedIn provides the business pages like Facebook.

Contacts Number

As already said, LinkedIn is not made to compete to see who has more friends like on Twitter or Facebook, but it is important to have a professional network widespread. Having more than 500 professional contacts allows you to display the icon “500 +” next to your name, which is evaluated in a positive way by the internal search engine.

How to increase the contacts number

Yes, ok, reaching 501 contacts seems to be an arduous task for many, however, is not difficult, always respecting the rules of the Social Network. The best method is the discussion groups: actively participating in discussion groups on the skill that you want to put in prominence, you will have the double advantage of being better evaluated by search engine and get in touch with strangers but with an interest in common. Once you have established a professional relationship within the group, it’s easy to replicate this privately asking for a connection and indicating that he attended a group in common. In any case, never leave your message text by default, but always write two lines of personalized presentation and, at this stage, never advertise your business.

LION Groups

A separate section is dedicated to the LION groups. LION stands for LinkedIn Open Networker and these are people who are interested in constantly increase the number of contacts with people who do not really know. The people who belong to these groups are prepared to not report to LinkedIn a contact from a person not previously known, however, is not automatic that the recipient accepts the invitation.

To participate in this system, you must subscribe to one or more LION groups and add your name to a specific post (and your own email in case it is set to require it to those who question the contact), but also in this case I always suggest to personalize the message with two lines of presentation.